


patient, fine, balanced, kind

by Springsteen



Series: open all night [10]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 12:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7362271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Springsteen/pseuds/Springsteen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at Shitty and Lardo's relationship over the years</p>
            </blockquote>





	patient, fine, balanced, kind

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt "i'm fine". title from bon iver's "skinny love"

Shitty would be lost without Lardo. He made friends pretty easily - he was loud and outgoing and also had the benefit of being a cis white male. The world had been designed with him in mind, and he recognized that privilege. Still, there were only a few people in this world he would literally die for. One of them was a six-foot tall Quebecois hockey-playing madman. The other was literally perfect, at least in Shitty’s eyes.

It took Lardo about three weeks of being the hockey team manager to be able to see through all of their bullshit, Shitty’s included. It took them a little longer to become best friends, but not much. It had gone a little something like this:

Shitty’s second Parents’ Weekend at Samwell wasn’t any easier than his first. Seeing everyone showing their parents around campus reminded him that his dad was literally the worst and his mom was currently on sabbatical in London. He was on his way over to the Haus, wondering if the Zimmermanns would mind if he went to dinner with them and Jack. Then again, that wouldn’t really be fair to Jack. He was so preoccupied he didn’t even notice where he was walking, and he crashed into someone. Automatically, he grabbed them by the shoulders to stop them from falling.

“Are you okay?” Lardo asked.

“Yeah, dude, I’m fine,” he said, his hands falling from her shoulders. She frowned up at him for a second and he felt completely transparent. Shitty hoped she wouldn’t call him on it, wouldn’t make him explain just how much he hated parents’ weekend and his fucked-up family and basically the whole world right now.

“I heard there’s a pretty good Indian restaurant somewhere around here,” she said. “Wanna go?”

“Fuck yeah,” Shitty said. He hesitated for less than a second before linking his arm through hers. “I don’t know where it is, but that sounds amazing right now.”

Lardo shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”

* * *

Lardo needed the boys to respect her if she was going to be a successful team manager. It was a long process that had many steps, and she thought she was doing pretty well, but she knew the whole thing hinged on one point. If it seemed like there was even the remotest possibility that she would sleep with any of them, the whole dynamic would shift. The tower of respectability and stability she’d built would crumble. Yeah, it was some sexist bullshit, but it was true.

Still, it fucking hurt to watch pretty girls flirt with Shitty, wish him luck in the playoffs, admire his stupidly toned legs in the shorts he was wearing, even as the last piles of snow slowly melted away. The girl was pretty in a classic Disney princess kind of way, big eyes and a sheet of straight blond hair. She brushed her hand along Shitty’s arm, and Lardo fought down the wave of jealousy that crashed through her. It was because he was on her team, she told herself, nothing more than that.   
When Shitty looked up, noticed Lardo across Lake Quad, and yelled out in greeting, she couldn’t hide her grin. He turned to say goodbye to the girl he’d been talking to, but she didn’t let him leave until she’d scrawled her number across his arm. It was a little harder for Lardo to keep smiling as Shitty ran over to her.

“Hey Lardo!” Shitty yelled, still halfway across Lake Quad. “You good?”

“Yeah,” she said with a shrug. “I’m fine.” 

Shitty stopped a few feet from her, smiling. “Yeah?” He offered his fist for a bump. Once Lardo obliged, he slung his arm around her shoulders. “What’re you up to this beautiful afternoon?”

Lardo snorted. It was barely sixty degrees and overcast. Not what most people would call beautiful weather. “Dunno,” she said. “Why, you up to anything special?”

“Funny you should ask,” Shitty said, steering them across Lake Quad, back towards the Haus where he and Jack lived with Johnson and their senior d-man pair, Trotty and Blitz. “Jack said he wanted to go golfing today. I was thinking we could hit golf balls from the reading room to the lax house.”  
Lardo glanced up at him. “That’s a terrible plan,” she said. “I’m in. Have you thought about building a mini-golf course in the yard, though?”

Abruptly, Shitty stopped walking. He grabbed Lardo’s shoulders and turned her to face him. “No, I have not thought of that,” he said slowly. “That is brilliant. You’re so smart, Lardo. What would we do without you?” 

“Start a war with the lax bros, probably,” she said with a shrug, Shitty’s arm moving with her. 

“They totally deserve it,” Shitty said.

“Jack would be mad if they stole his golf clubs in retaliation,” she pointed out.

Shitty shook his head. “You’re always right,” he said. “Let’s go find some cardboard boxes and make a shitty mini-golf course. Pun intended.”

* * *

Samwell was beyond terrible without Lardo. Yeah, Shitty was excited for her, having all kinds of amazing adventures in Kenya. Lardo was out seeing the world and Shitty was still in Massachusetts, still taking five classes a semester and dragging himself to practice every morning. 

Their first few games of the season had been good. This year’s group of frogs were pretty decent, and they’d really play well if they could get Bitty to stop curling up on the ice every time somebody even looked in his direction. He’d been emailing Lardo constantly, but they only sent one or two a day because of the huge time difference. In her last email, Lardo had suggested they Skype that weekend. Shitty didn’t care that he’d agreed to get up at nine a.m. on a Saturday - this was the first time he’d see Lardo in months, even if they weren’t really seeing each other in person. 

Shitty had a blanket around his shoulders, the laptop angled carefully so Lardo couldn’t actually see that Shitty was naked in his bed. It took painfully long for the connection to go through, and then another few seconds waiting for their cameras to function, and then Lardo was smiling at him, long hair pulled back and the sun slanting in bright behind her. 

“Hey, Shits,” she said, a tiny lag between the camera feed and the audio. “How’re you?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He wished he could reach through the computer and hold Lardo, could stretch his arms across the Atlantic to hug her. They’d only been apart for a few months. He couldn’t believe how much he missed her, how empty Samwell felt without her. The hockey team would go on without her, their lives would go on, but for once Shitty was counting down the days to the end of the semester because spring semester meant Lardo was coming back. “Tell me absofuckinlutely everything about Kenya, and then I need to tell you about this one frog who like, exhales pies, I swear to god.”

Lardo leaned closer to the screen. “Did you say he exhales pies?”

“Yeah,” Shitty said, gesturing wildly. “I was giving the frogs their Haus tour, he was in the kitchen for literally five fucking minutes, and he’s holding a goddamn cherry pie. I know no one else who lives here coulda done that shit.”

Lardo laughed. “That’s amazing. I miss you guys.”

All his life, Shitty had been an emotional guy. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and he never really knew how to hide it. He desperately hoped the slow internet connection and dim morning light in his room would hide the tears that had sprung to his eyes. “I miss you too, Lardo,” he said, completely heartfelt. Here he was, holding his heart out on a tiny college campus in the States and hoping he could throw it seven thousand miles across the world, hoping Lardo would even want it in the first place. “We all miss you,” he added. “Tell me everything about Kenya, I wanna hear fuckin’ all of it.”

* * *

Lardo knew from the moment they met that this would happen. It was inevitable, like the rising of the sun, like snowfall in the winter and like Jack’s dedication to hockey. Shitty was a year older than her, and that meant he would graduate a year before her, would go on to live his life at Harvard Law and leave her behind at Samwell. For three years, she’d had time to prepare herself. She thought she was ready, but seeing Shitty in his cap and gown at graduation still shook her.  
“Still can’t fuckin’ believe I had to kill the flow,” Shitty said, running a hand through the edges of his newly short hair.

“It was pretty rank, Shits,” she said. She’d spent the last three years–hell, the last five years, really–burying her emotions under a veneer of cool. He laughed and tousled her short hair. At graduation, she sat with Bitty, with other Wellies who’d stuck around to watch their friends graduate. They cheered for Shitty and for Jack. After the ceremony, they pose for picture after picture until her face hurts from smiling. She wasn’t even the one with the diploma, not yet.

Shitty’s arm was still around her. They hadn’t moved from their picture pose. “Hey, you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, man,” she said, sniffling and brushing at her eye. “Yeah, I’m fine, just allergies or whatever.” Graduation at Samwell was out on Lake Quad, it was a totally credible excuse.

An excuse that Shitty saw straight through. He grabbed her and pulled her into a tight hug. “We’re gonna be okay, right?” he asked, his voice soft. 

“I think we’re gonna survive, Shits,” she said, gripping the back of his robes tightly. 

“I know that,” Shitty said. He let go just enough to meet Lardo’s gaze. “I still want to be best friends. I want to talk to you all the time and get high and build stupid mini-golf courses and just sit around reading and chirping Jack from a room away. I don’t want to leave you.” His voice cracked on the last sentence and his hands shook against Lardo’s back.

“We never spend summer together,” Lardo pointed out. “And we got through my semester abroad. Boston’s a lot closer than Nairobi.”

“Fuckin’ hell.” Shitty pulled Lardo into another crushing hug. “You’ve always been the smart one.”

“You’re the one going to law school,” she said.

“Don’t remind me,” he groaned. “I’ll come visit whenever I can.”

“Same here,” Lardo said. She buried her face in Shitty’s shoulder, hating the feeling of the cheap polyester robe. “God, I’m gonna miss you and your stupid ‘stache so much.”

Shitty’s laugh rumbled through her body. “I’m gonna miss your everything so much.” He pressed his cheek to the top of her head. “We’ll be fine, right Lardo?”

“Yeah,” Lardo said. “Yeah, Shits, we’ll be fine.”


End file.
